• Question: what is the chaos theory and theory of relativity?

    Asked by misaki to Mike, Pip, Tianfu, Tim, Tom on 27 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Tom Lister

      Tom Lister answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      In short, chaos theory is probably more Tim’s thing with the weather interest and the aerosols – its a way of looking a system containing loads of variables and seeing how a small change can influence all of them. It’s sort of playing on the way that Physicists like to simplify things by ignoring what is going on around them and showing that this often doesn’t reflect reality.

      Relativity is a way of looking at things from another point of view. So, for example, you are on a train which is moving along and you are throwing straight up and catching it. To somebody standing still outside of the train, the ball doesn’t seem to go straight up and down, it is also moving along at the speed of the train.

      The you get to ‘Things can’t go faster than light, so what happens if you are on a train that is travelling at the speed of light and throw the ball forwards?’

    • Photo: Philippa Bird

      Philippa Bird answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      I can’t really get my head around either!

    • Photo: Tim Stephens

      Tim Stephens answered on 27 Jun 2012:

      Chaos theory is a way of understanding complicated systems – like for example the weather in the world. It basically says that if you make a small change to the system, then the system will behave very differently than if you hadn’t. The story that’s always wheeled out is the one about a butterfly flapping its wings in the rain-forest and that causing a storm on the other side of the world. Whilst this story is a little extreme (and not true), it give you an idea that small changes to the starting state of a system can have a large effect on how that system behaves later.

      The theory of relativity is a way of understanding how things can look different depending on where you are relative to where they are happening. An example that I was told when I was learning about relativity was to imagine a ball bouncing straight up and down on a moving train. To a passenger on the train, it looks like the ball is going straight up and down. To someone standing on the platform, the ball looks like its moving sideways in a zig-zag pattern (because you add the train’s sideways motion to the ball’s up and down). These two people are looking at the same event happening, but they don’t see the same thing.

      EDIT: Just noticed that’s pretty much what Tom wrote…

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